Yes, the endnote convention was already available to Yeats, as T.S. Eliot makes apparent in The Waste Land - Eliot, who also said great poets steal. But as you say, Yeats likely felt his conversation with the past - which it is - was apparent. I constantly write in conversation with the past, and hope to produce some good stuff along the way. Art in which the past is not apparent - and plenty of recent American poetry fits this definition - risks seeming shallow and ungrounded sub specie aeternitatis. As formalists, we are most of us here in constant conversation with the dead.
I also like Andrew's rather different point about power relationships, which seems a distinction worth making.
Cheers,
John
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